my robot will be autonomous and will have 4 motors one for each wheel and 2 additional motors to manipulate cans and tetra packs. What language can i program the axon in? It turns out i can connect 2 picaxe 28x1 but the axon chips seems nice

the romeo arduino sounds like it would suit your needs, you could use the 2 inbuilt motor drivers for the minipulation and use two dual motor drivers, my new robot runs the arduino and i really like it.

well it depend on what arduino you get the mega is $65, the stamp is 33 but you have to spend all the other money on the accessories. I suppose there is the pro and pro mini boards.

It is the question that gets all newbies "what board do i get for this job" and nearly every time every one suggests the same board as they always do.

well are you planning on continuing robotics after as if you are make a decision on a board you'll be happy with for a long time. Do you have a budget? if so what is it. if it a university or other funding go for the better ones(if your not restricted to make it as affordable as possible)

they are there for your use. they have some jumper pins to connect them so when they are no in use they don't use up any i/o. They are handy when you need to initialize a a new function, set the robot doing a particular function(eg. S1 could be scan room to convey data to the computer for a map and S2 might be setting the robot going.)

they are also handy when you are learning to code as you can use the to blink leds, turn a servo etc.

S1-S5 are on the analogue pinS6 digital pinS7 digital pin

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indeed cybertooth are kinda expensive so am probably going with some L293D

But of course if you use WebbotLib then its not a problem. Has built in support for L293D and many other motor controllers.

For the Axon it would be a breeze.

Can't comment on Romeo as I've never really managed to get any decent schematics for those duino things (except Roboduino). They seem to want to tie you into Arduino software by making the hardware unintelligible to everyone else. I'm sure they're great (for committed duinoids!).